Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking is a commonly accepted Internet term for linking to another website’s images. In other words, if you develop a website, some other person may want to use the images you have and rather than downloading them from your site and then uploading them to their own website, they may simply put links straight to your site. In this way, every time a visitor opens their site, the images will be loaded from your account, as a result stealing from your own monthly traffic quota, not to mention the copyright problems which could develop or that someone may be trying to deceive people into thinking that they are actually on your website. In rare situations, documents and other types of files may also be linked in the same exact way. To prevent this from happening and to avoid this sort of situations, you may activate hotlink protection for your site.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very intuitive tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our shared hosting and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to select the Internet site that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you would like to enable the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as effortless - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.